International Briefs, Jan. 16, 2018

A roundup of vendor and operator news from around the globe. Today's edition includes Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Africa

Quika is launching free high-speed satellite Internet for consumers in developing countries. The service will be available to all individuals and businesses and is scheduled to launch in Q2 of 2018 in much of Africa, Afghanistan and Iraq before rolling out to other developing countries. Quika Free will be supported by the company’s commercial activities.

According to Digital TV Research, pay TV revenues for 20 countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) will reach $3.62 billion in 2023, up by only 7.8% on 2017. Pay TV revenues are expected to fall in 2018. They are expected to be flat in 2019 before starting a slow recovery.

Concentrating just on the 13 Arabic-speaking countries in the region, pay TV revenues are expected to grow by 24% from $1.18 billion in 2017 to $1.46 billion in 2023, despite pay TV subscriptions rising by 47% over the same period to 5.84 million. If subscriptions are growing faster than revenues, then ARPUs must be falling.

Germany

German cable operator Unitymedia is upgrading its network with flexible grid capabilities and deploying Ciena's (NYSE:CIEN) WaveLogic Ai coherent solution. Unitymedia will also use a number of services from Ciena's Specialist Services Portfolio, such as installation, operation and testing.

WaveLogic Ai is designed to provide channel capacities up to 400 Gbps on a single wavelength. The deployment is intended to let Unitymedia offer new high capacity bandwidth services, deliver up to four times the bandwidth within the same infrastructure and site environment while reducing the cost per bit, and benefit from reduced footprint, power consumption and cooling requirements.

Unitymedia, a subsidiary of Liberty Global, is headquartered in Cologne and has 7.2 million customers.

Moldova

Orange Moldova has launched a new convergent TV offering (TV + Internet + mobile) using Viaccess-Orca's Adaptive Sentinel Conditional Access System (CAS) along with set-top boxes from Hi-Global Technology and CI+ modules from Neotion. Following the recent acquisition of Moldovan cable operator Sun Communications, Orange tapped Viaccess-Orca to expand its service portfolio to include fixed Internet and pay TV subscriptions.

Moldova is a landlocked nation in eastern Europe, sandwiched between Romania and Ukraine. The former Soviet republic has a population of about 3 million.